For not only was the state of Keith's soul a reproach to Isaac's
conscience, but the brilliance of Keith's intellect was a terror to
it. Any day that same swift illuminating power might be turned on to
the dark places in his own soul, showing up the deplorable
discrepancies between his inner and his outer life. He wanted his son
and everybody else to think well of him, and Keith's lucid sincerity
at times appalled him. He had not yet discovered that his protection
was in the very thing he feared. Keith was so recklessly single-minded
that it never occurred to him that his father could lead a double
life; he never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the
Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man. He, Keith, sat so
lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply
could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in
itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances. The
book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply
the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it
all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In
fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father
as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop.
But when in his right mind he had no grudge whatever against the shop.
He had been born over the shop, nursed behind the shop, and the shop
had been his schoolroom ever since he could spell.
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